A former Guardian critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed book Eric Gill (1989). Her next book, William Morris (1994) won the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award. She also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011), and was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2009. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. She also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, and has been awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts.